


the stupor of longing or pure light

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2017-12-13 12:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was difficult for him to observe the passage of time in other people’s bodies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stupor of longing or pure light

It was difficult for him to observe the passage of time in other people’s bodies. It was hard enough in his own; harder as the years went on and he grew more abstract, secure and inviolable in his power. But at least as an immortal fox spirit he’d been alert to the seasons, his mouth thick with the business of the forest whenever he left it. The rogat orjak he took over at the beginning of his imprisonment had no such tie to the mild cycles of the Court, which saw little definite weather even before it began to tamper with the rain, and was as estranged from the bora of the Alps as it was from the bottom of the ocean.

The rogat orjak’s body expected rushing cold, air funneled between peaks, and ice that crusted the granite and floated in the lakes even into June. It had once leapt from crag to crag across green valleys, carried the distance by unbelievable gusts. The most that could be said for the Court was that sometimes it got hail. Although sometimes, he had noticed, the highest turrets were buffeted by winds that hardly belonged to the lowlands and the river. Once he saw a robot blown clean off its mount—the gossamer limbs, the struggle, the fall. Like an insect flicked from a knife’s tip. When? Impossible to say. Eglamore, his captor, grew older without seeming to change, except that he eventually filled out the shoulders of his ridiculous suit. “Makes you look like a muppet,” said Renard, and Eglamore, tired or merely gentle, said, “She didn’t pick me either, you know.”

Well, yes. Of course he did.

But she came back to see him. Not at first, because she was angry with him and then, perhaps, ashamed; but before she left the Court to travel with Carver, she visited him twice, as kind as ever she had been and as young. She brought him flowers which made him dizzy with lust—for her, and the sky; and the world across the chasm, where they had braided daisy chains in dappled sunlight and she had arrayed him with bonds. He suspected there was molecular tampering involved in the family history of the flowers she gave him now. The Donlans, no doubt, looking for a formula that would keep him pacified long enough for them to investigate the nature of his gift.

It worked for an hour. But he would let Surma crown him in poppies where he would have eviscerated anyone else, stringing red around the base of his horns, and afterwards he grew unmanageably morose. He thought she had probably forgotten that he was ever anything but a monster and a murderer, and too grossly muscular to boot—he should have remembered that she had loved his litheness, his wit, not his strength. His shackle clanked every time he reached for her. Still the temptation to show her his new biceps was a dreadful weight on him, and at last he succumbed, remembering too late that his gain was at the cost of a friend’s mind, a protector’s life. What had the fellow’s name been? Sivo? Surma slapped his arm and left without a word. It was uncharacteristic of her. He didn’t feel the blow until, that night, he dreamed.

The second time, she was trembling and determined, not falsely gay. She stepped across the room and laid her hand on the crest above his eye, hot as a brand. “Renard,” she said. “Remember that I’ll always love ya.” She was more formal than she had ever been, even when she was handing him over to the Court. She seemed to be searching for something else to add, but he needed nothing, wanted nothing, and he turned his head blindly into the silence of her palm.

Then nothing for an eternity. She married that skeleton Carver, he was told. Bewitchment, or she had been forced—the Court had great faith in the power of breeding, would isolate genes wherever it could. Except they would know that she could not be made to have a child. She was too valuable, too unlike anyone in the world, to be burnt on that altar. Who could be worth more even to them? She would not submit. He could picture her in his mind’s eye, the bulk of her hair like a castle of cloud, and blushing at sunset; that awful make-up that she had always worn, applying it sometimes while he lay curled nose-to-tail by her legs. He didn’t understand it; would certainly have licked it off her, had the cosmetics not been too bitter even for his stomach. She said, it is my face.

But so, the time. When she came again she was twenty-six, although he didn’t know it. She looked like a woman of fifty. Her hair, though buoyant, was shot with gray, and lines fanned out at the corners of her eyes like the tracks of wading birds. She trembled not from passion but from cold. Renard thought, have I been here a hundred years? A thousand? Surely it would not be possible, in all that time, for these thin claws to be her upturned hands. She hardly saw him. “Renard,” she said, “you wouldna  _believe_  the things I have eaten.” She told him about Paris and about Rio de Janeiro, about songbirds consumed live—what’s wrong with that, he said, sniffing, and she laughed like a ghost. “They do struggle,” she said. It dawned on him that she was speaking as a woman on a quest, a pilgrimage, and not a hopeful one. On foot she sought a cure.

“Surma,” he cried, “what is it? What’s the disease?” But she didn’t answer him. She clasped his insensible head as though they were old friends, and the water of their friendship was clean and free of blood; she hugged his neck, her arms spanning only a third of its girth, and wept into the whiteness of his scales.  


End file.
